A Love Letter in Cuneiform by Tomáš Zmeškal

Author:Tomáš Zmeškal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

11

SECOND VISION OF IMMORTALITY

Without anyone saying, uttering, or mentioning it, word spread, around the square and then around the city, that the device needed repairing. Only when this verdict reached us, wrapped in a veil of obscurity and uncertainty, did most people realize, to their painful embarrassment, that no one actually knew what purpose the device served. Even I was not entirely certain, despite that my great-grandfather made repairs to the device during the last remodeling of the city hall and its main tower. The situation reached the point where the city council, forced by no one knew exactly what—probably some vague sense of responsibility—decided to appropriate funds to repair the device. The news reached me from several sources until finally it came about that I was, shall we say, indirectly and reluctantly invited to assist in the repairs. The problem was that although we managed to dig up some of the old drawings and plans, along with a notebook containing all the mathematical calculations, deliberations on use of materials, and records of payments in a currency that no longer exists, even after a thorough study of all these documents and drawings it wasn’t entirely clear to us what purpose the device in the tower had in fact originally served. The city officials and city council came up with the idea of holding a public competition. Casting a net, they called it, in the hope that it would turn up somebody who remembered what the device had been for. Yet at the same time they remained handcuffed by an undifferentiated mixture of humility, fear, and shame at our own ignorance. The device had been the pride of our ancestors, that much we knew. Generations ago, people traveled from all across the continent to look at it. Bunches of tourists clustered in front of city hall with their oldfangled optical imaging apparatuses, capturing visual likenesses of the exterior of the device. In those days it wasn’t yet possible to capture sound and image simultaneously, and even on the few occasions when they succeeded, everything came out flat. There was no common way to produce a natural three-dimensional reproduction. Then people sat down and observed the image on a flat screen from a distance, with no way to step into it and take part in the action unfolding before them. Amazingly, they didn’t seem to find it boring. Vilém, a historian I came to know while working on the reconstruction of the device, explained that people in those days would look at the flat images in special books. Apparently, friends would get together, look through the books, and narrate them as they went along. Usually the pictures showed their family or friends and the places they had visited. A whole complicated etiquette developed around this custom, which today only a handful of specialists understand. After long and cautious deliberations it was finally decided that the device would be repaired, in spite of the fact that its purpose remained unclear. Master architect Matthias

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